Safeguarding:

How It Affects Professional Practice

Elizabeth Urban and Hessel Willemsen

Child neglect and abuse regularly come up in our therapeutic work with adults when they tell us about early traumatic and abusive experiences. Typically, the analyst’s attention turns to the internal child in the adult patient and interprets accordingly. Although the focus on psychodynamic understanding is appropriate, current Safeguarding legislation requires that, if the clinician has a reasonable belief that neglect or abuse is occurring to an actual child in the external world, the analyst must act.

The aim of this presentation is to draw attention to Safeguarding policy, which implies that we are legally responsible for ‘safeguarding’ children and vulnerable adults that may come to our attention through the work with the adult patient. Elizabeth Urban will present clinical examples of safeguarding and how they might be handled, and Hessel Willemsen will explain the legislation. They will also present some dilemmas about safeguarding versus confidentiality. There will be time for participants to raise their concerns about Safeguarding issues they have or have had in their clinical practices.

Elizabeth Urban, PhD, is an SAP Training Analyst. She trained with Michael Fordham from whom she developed an interest in early development. This interest eventually led to providing infant-parent therapy in Child and Adolescent Mental Health in community services and in a psychiatric in-patient mental health mother-baby unit. She was the co-coordinator of the Child Analytic Training at the SAP until it closed in 2005. She has led infant observation seminars for over twenty years. She has written numerous papers on Fordham’s model of development and infant research. She currently works in private practice with adults, teaches and supervises those working with children.